If you use Unix today, you can enjoy relatively long file names on more or less any filesystem that you care to name. But it wasn’t always this way. Research V7 had 14-byte filenames, and the System III/System V lineage continued this restriction until it merged with BSD Unix, which had significantly increased this limit as part of moving to a new filesystem (initially called the ‘Fast File System’, for good reasons). You might wonder where this unusual number came from, and for that matter, what the file name limit was on very early Unixes (it was 8 bytes, which surprised me; I vaguely assumed that it had been 14 from the start).
↫ Chris Siebenmann
I love these historical explanations for seemingly arbitrary limitations.
Until today, Windows has a file path/name limit of 265 (?) characters, which is easily reached with a couple of subfolders and long descriptive file names. There’s a registry setting to enable long file names, but most people will never hear about it. Even when enabled, it seems that OneDrive still has its own, slightly higher, file path limit which I’ve encountered a few times and wondered why some random files don’t sync (or worse: they are synced but can’t be opened on the local computer).